Reuters
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China’s Ministry of Defense announced on Friday that two top military leaders will be expelled from the ruling Communist Party and the military on corruption charges, leading to a purge of the highest-ranking officers in an anti-corruption campaign starting in 2023.
He Weidong, China’s No. 2 general, and Admiral Miao Hua, the former top political officer of the Chinese military, are the latest military officials to become targets of the People’s Liberation Army’s anti-corruption campaign.
His dismissal is the first time a sitting general from the Central Military Commission has been removed since the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. He has not been seen in public since March, and no investigation into his activities has previously been disclosed by Chinese authorities.
Defense Ministry spokesman Zhang Xiaogang said he, Miao and seven other senior military officials named in the announcement were “suspected of serious violations of party discipline and serious mission-related crimes involving extremely large sums of money.”
The statement further said their crimes were “of a serious nature with extremely harmful consequences” and called it “an important achievement in the Party and military’s anti-corruption campaign.”
The ouster of He, 68, has implications beyond the military, as he was also a member of the ruling Communist Party’s 24-member Politburo, the second most powerful party.
The general, one of the committee’s two vice-chairmen, is considered a close ally of President Xi Jinping, the PLA’s third most powerful commander and supreme military commander.
The announcement came just days before the Communist Party Central Committee, an elite body of more than 200 senior officials, is scheduled to hold its fourth general meeting in Beijing. Further personnel decisions, including the expulsion and replacement of central committee members, are expected to be formally decided at this meeting.
“Mr. Xi is certainly doing some housecleaning. The formal dismissal of Mr. He and Mr. Miao means that the General Assembly of the Central Military Commission can appoint new members to the Central Military Commission, which has been effectively half-vacant since March,” said Wen Ti Song, Atlantic Council Global China Hub Fellow.
Miao was investigated in November last year on suspicion of “serious violations of discipline” and was removed from the Central Military Commission in June.
Other senior officials named include He Hongjun, a former senior official of the PLA Political Work Department, Wang Xibin of the Central Military Commission Joint Operations Command Center, Lin Xiangyang, a former commander of the Eastern Theater Command, and two former political commissars of the PLA Army and Navy. Observers noted that many of these officials had disappeared from public view for several months.
Wang Chunning, a former commander of the People’s Armed Police Force who was also named in the statement, was removed from the National Assembly last month along with three other PLA generals.
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Mr. He’s purge is thought to involve individuals with extensive operational experience and long ties to Mr. Xi.
His ties to the president date back to his dual stints in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces in the late 1990s. Mr. Xi served as deputy party secretary and provincial governor from 1995 to 2002.
He joined the Military Commission after commanding the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command in Fujian Province. Fujian province borders Taiwan and could be a key area in the dispute over the autonomous island that Beijing claims as its own territory.
In 2022, he was promoted directly to vice-chairman of the Military Commission, bypassing the usual step of serving on the 205-member Central Committee.
The Pentagon announced that he played a key role in planning live-fire training around Taiwan after then-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi angered China by visiting Taipei in August 2022. The exercise was the most aggressive move the Chinese government has made against Taiwan in recent years.
